Originally published on 24 November 2013 on www.boldface.com.au:
We’ve all passed comment on poorly written spam, particularly those Nigerian letters asking you to send your bank account details so that they can transfer a load of money to you, or the emails from your ‘bank’ with basic spelling errors.
I thought I’d point out the opposite. Well, not actually opposite, in that this spam, a comment waiting for moderation on a blog post, is not beautiful writing in and of itself. But I think it’s really fantastic in fulfilling its purpose, to try to get published, though the author (or robot) probably didn’t expect to be published in this form.
Magnificent goods from you, man. I have take into accout your stuff prior to and you are simply extremely wonderful. I actually like what you’ve acquired right here, certainly like what you’re stating and the best way in which you assert it. You’re making it entertaining and you still care for to stay it smart. I can’t wait to learn much more from you. That is actually a wonderful website.
OK. I’m exaggerating. ‘Account’ is spelt incorrectly and ‘you still care for to stay it smart’ is a mind-twister. Still, it’s so wonderfully vague. The ‘goods’ could refer to either a product or the writing itself. It piles on the praise, so unspecific that it feels like it could be specific. I ‘like what you’re stating… and the way in which you assert it’.
The different forms of praise are impressive: previous knowledge of one’s work or reputation, personal praise: ‘you are simply extremely wonderful’, praise for the writing itself appealing to someone who wants to be 1/ entertaining 2/caring and/or 3/smart. The spambot tries to establish a personal connection (‘I can’t want to learn much more from you’) before admitting (‘actually’) that it’s not only read the blog post but the whole website.
As a bit of marketing, whoever wrote this out put some thought into: ‘How can I appeal to the widest number of website owners and bloggers in a way that they’ll be more likely to accept this as a comment which allows me to put my spammy e-mail address or website in their comments? How can I not let on that I haven’t read the post and am indeed a robot?’
Well done, spambot writer. I hope someone paid you well for your work.
My favourite thing to do in Paris is to ride around on a Vélib, the almost free biking system. I wondered how much it had changed in seven years, as I’d heard a lot had changed. New operators. Competition from other bike schemes, more chaotically organised where people leave the bikes in random places. Electric scooters too, which I’m too afraid to try. And e-bikes. The current Vélib system has e-bikes.
a ‘découverte’ card. It was only EUR 5 and required photos to stick to the card. Why hadn’t I brought those extra photos I kept for just such an occasion? There are actually photo booths all over Paris, and the train stations, so I made some photos for EUR 10, went and bought the proper card from the fellow (who sort of indicated, ‘oh, that’s what you wanted’) and then discovered that you really don’t need the photos on the card, and the photo doesn’t fit in any case. I cut it down to size and stuck in on anyways.
But sorry for all these details. The experience on the bikes was as good as ever. There are more bike paths than I remember, many of them wide, and busy with cyclists (and some scooters). What surprised me was that with so many Vélibs in use at all times, the biggest problem was not finding a Vélib but finding an empty spot to put the Vélibs back at the stations. Even though they seem to have a new system where you can put a Vélib back in a station when it’s full, by locking itself to something else, the one time I needed to try it, I couldn’t figure it out.
It was exhilarating and terrifying as you are often in busy traffic and super close to the cars. But the thing is, Parisian drivers seem to be use to all this chaos, and there are so many other bikes on the road. So, you just try your best, and cars move around you, and you around cars. The only time I saw people raise their voices was to prevent accidents, when a pedestrian or car or bike were really too close and about to collide.
took me five days before a young colleague told me she’d had the same problem and you have to press ‘3’ on the dashboard to give it some juice, otherwise it stays in ‘1’. I only got to try a proper ebike once after that. Strangely, it was on a bike that someone had left at a station unlocked and still running (on their account), but they’d already set it on ‘3’ and what a difference it made. It was fast and quite fun.
